


Bad Moon Rising

by betts



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Coda, Episode: s06e02 Red Sun Rising, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, complicated becho feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 10:31:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18364235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betts/pseuds/betts
Summary: Set during and after 6x02 "Red Sun Rising" in which Murphy says some things he shouldn't, and Clarke and Bellamy deal with the aftermath.





	Bad Moon Rising

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers obviously for season 6, so if you haven't seen eps 1 and 2 you should maybe avoid this fic. 
> 
> For jasperjoordan, who wanted post-6x02 hurt/comfort, and planetshunters, who wanted more Murphy.

I hope you got your things together  
I hope you are quite prepared to die  
Look's like we're in for nasty weather  
One eye is taken for an eye

—CCR, "Bad Moon Rising"

* * *

Murphy won’t stop banging his head against the wall. Clarke wants to throw something at him, but that’ll only make it worse. At least he stopped sharing his laundry list of her misdeeds. Hypocrite. Bellamy can’t meet her eyes. The thing she is most ashamed to admit is this: she doesn’t care anymore. She knows she should feel something — remorse, regret, sadness, despair, grief — but inside her is a whirling pit of nothingness. If she died, it’d be one less thing on her to-do list.

“And that’s just the shit you've done to me,” Murphy says. “What about him?” He nods to Bellamy.

Her arm is going numb in the restraint. When her mind idles like this, she goes dark places. She’s almost grateful for Murphy’s habitual monologue, even if his ire is pointed at her.

“What about me?” Bellamy asks.

“She left you after Mount Weather. She locked you up. She threw you in the pit.” He turns his attention to Clarke. “And let’s not ignore the biggest, ugliest, most unrequited elephant in the room.”

“Murphy,” Bellamy says, a low threat in his voice.

“What? You think she doesn’t know?”

“Know what?” Clarke asks.

Murphy’s smile spreads slowly across is face. “Golden boy here had it bad for you.”

“What?” Clarke says, at the same time Bellamy stands up so abruptly his chair slides across the floor.

“Should have seen that first year up there.” Murphy’s eyes flick to the ceiling. “He was a mess.”

“Give me my key,” Bellamy says to Clarke. She ignores him, and Murphy too, turns to the side on her little box and tries to shut them out.

“You’re never going to tell her,” Murphy says to Bellamy. “No reason to. You settled for your silver medal.”

“Shut up, Murphy.”

“But Echo did too. Can’t have King Roan, so the fallen knight is close enough. Meanwhile the queen was waiting for you all along.” Murphy wipes away a fake tear. “You could have been so happy.”

“He’s lying,” Bellamy says to Clarke’s back.

He isn’t, though. She knows it like she knows there’s something wrong with this planet. She’s always known. But there’s nothing to be done about it now. Whatever she and Bellamy could have been — it’s too late.

Upstairs, Miller and Jackson begin shouting.

* * *

Bellamy choked her. She stabbed him. Murphy has some weird alien poisoning. Bellamy is pissed at Octavia. Raven is pissed at Abby. Everyone is pissed at Clarke. Diyoza is awake, and so is Madi, and they killed some people back on the ship. Par for the course.

Tuesdays. She's always hated Tuesdays.

They’ve been taken to a small room, a clinic of sorts. Bellamy is balancing on her shoulders and she’s walking him over to the exam table. Or massage table. Whatever it is, it looks sturdy enough. There are too many colors here. It’s too bright, smells sweet like the whole planet has been drenched in honey. It’s giving her a headache. Or maybe that's the oxygen deprivation. Or the gassing. Her throat is on fire.

Bellamy still won’t meet her eyes, now for entirely different reasons. She eases him onto the table. He’s clutching a cloth to his leg, soaked in blood, and winces as he settles.

“Take your pants off,” she says as she drops Jackson’s med pack onto a chair.

“Gotta take me out to dinner first.”

She glares at him, but he complies. He takes off his jacket first, and she finds herself staring at his arms. Hard to believe six years on algae could offer him any bulk.

“You’re staring,” he says as he unbuttons and lowers his pants.

“Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

He snorted. “You wish.”

“Is that how you want to play this?”

He sits back on the exam table. Even though he's still wearing a t-shirt and boxers, far more modest than when he walked around shirtless at the dropship, he still seems naked.

“What?” he asks.

“Like it’s nothing. Like you didn’t find out I called you every day for six years. Like Murphy didn’t just tell me you were in love with me from the day we hit the ground. Like you didn’t just try to kill me and I didn’t stab you and gas us both.”

He shrugs. “It’s nothing until you say it’s something.”

She hates him some days. His loyalty. Even when he can’t stand her, he’d still follow her to hell.

She opens an antiseptic wipe and runs it over the wound. He hisses inward through his teeth.

“Don’t be a baby,” she says. The bleeding has stopped. The wound looks clean, just a few stitches and a while off his feet, and he’ll be fine. Assuming the planet doesn’t try to kill them again.

She puts on a pair of gloves and gets out a suture kit. The exam table has a rolling stool and a magnifying glass with a light behind it. He grunts in pain when she squeezes the wound shut and slides the needle in. His muscles tense, and his knuckles are white where they squeeze the side of the table.

“Is it true? What Murphy said?” she asks, to distract him, she reasons, but also — she wants to know. Needs to.

“Doesn’t matter.”

She threads another stitch. “Do you love her?”

“Don’t ask me that.”

“Do you?”

“I thought you were dead.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“Of course I love her, Clarke. What we went through up there — it changed us. It changed all of us.”

“But you don’t love her the way you love me.”

Bellamy is silent long enough that she risks a glance up at him. His expression is pained, either from the suturing or the ugly truth, she doesn’t know.

“No,” he says. “I don’t.”

“Does she know?”

“She’s in the same boat. Murphy wasn’t lying.”

“So it’s your grief that tied you together.”

He nods reluctantly. She finishes the last stitch and pulls the needle through, clips the thread with scissors and rolls back to get a bandage from the bag.

“And now I’m back,” she says, “and Roan isn’t. That’s gotta make things complicated.”

“We shouldn’t be talking about this.”

She presses the gauze over his wound and slowly trails her thumb over the adhesive. “Then what should we be talking about? The fact you hallucinated me as your greatest threat, so you nearly choked me to death? That you’re still angry I left you to fight in the pit? The way I see it, pretending to be in love with another woman because you thought I was dead seems like the lightest topic available.”

“What do you want me to tell you? That I would have waited six years for you if I thought there was even a snowball’s chance in hell of your survival? That I’m in love with two people in two different ways and I have no idea what to do about it? And I can’t even think through it for five minutes because we spend every waking moment fighting for our lives?”

“It’s a start.” She lifts his leg and wraps his thigh with another bandage.

“I don’t know why it matters,” Bellamy says. “You’ve never felt the same for me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You had countless opportunities to do something about it, and you didn’t. You were hung up on Finn, then Lexa, and now Madi’s your highest priority. All I’ve ever been is your backup plan.”

She stands and slips off her gloves. “That’s not true.”

“Then tell me the truth.”

She tosses the gloves in what looks like a trash bin and circles back around to him, stepping close, between his open knees. “You used to be the most insufferable person I’d ever met, and then you became the only person I could trust. That trust was the most important thing to me, more important than holding hands or kissing or fucking or whatever else you think would’ve happened. I never needed a boyfriend, Bellamy. I needed someone on my six.”

“Why couldn’t I be both?”

“I kept you at arm’s distance because I knew one day you’d have to make a hard choice, and when that day came, you made the right one. I know you. You wouldn’t have been able to leave me behind if we were together.”

Part of her is angry that he let himself get so attached to someone else while he was on the Ring, but if she said it, she’d be a hypocrite. She’d end the world a hundred times if it meant Madi’s safety. She can’t expect him to stay alone forever.

She can see his agreement settle in his face. His eyes flick down to her throat, and he trails a finger over the tender skin of her neck. “I’m sorry I did this to you.”

“I’m sorry you see me as a threat to your family.”

His fingertips feel warm and gentle as they trace what she already knows to be the reddened lines of bruising. She gets a sick kind of satisfaction from it — his mark on her neck. His. Echo may have his body, his mind, but Clarke has his heart, and she always will.

“I want you to be in my family again,” he says softly. He leans forward an inch, searches her face for permission, and when he finds it, brushes her hair aside and presses a gentle kiss to her neck. She lets her eyes fall shut, relishes in the soft warmth of his lips as they trail down her throat, peppering kisses on the wounds he left behind. She clutches his shirt in her fist.

“One day we can stop fighting,” he says, lips grazing the shell of her ear. “One day we can try this.”

She steps back. Her hand trembles and her heart races, and she has to look down and away so he won’t see the warmth that has reached her face.

“One day,” she agrees. “But not today.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm bettsfic on tumblr and twitter.


End file.
